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Harvard Student Probably Regrets Asking Kellyanne Conway This Question

Leah Barkoukis
Leah Barkoukis  |  November 20, 2024 9:30 AM

Kellyanne Conway challenged a Harvard student on Tuesday to reflect on how much the Biden-Harris administration gaslit the American people, culminating in the blowout election the nation just saw.

The exchange took place during an event hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics discussing the 2024 presidential election, the incoming Trump administration, and the challenges ahead.

"I wanted to ask a question about your job as a White House spokesperson,” the student asked. “In that role, you said things that were often pretty audacious, often caused people to question things that they have seen with their own eyes…I was always wondering whether it was a survival response in what seemed like was a very chaotic White House or was it a strategy? So was it strategy or was it survival? You know, all the bantering with journalists, the alternative facts. Was it strategy or was it survival?" 

The former senior White House counselor pushed back, asking the student to define “alternative facts” to the room—referencing a mistake she made early in the first Trump administration when she says she conflated “alternative information and additional facts.” 

“You gave me two choices. And they're both inaccurate,” Conway replied, prompting a back-and-forth between them. 

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 “So, alternative facts. I gave you a good chance there, and it's a great chance for you because I don't need any more airtime. I get plenty of it…”

Conway explained that she turned down Trump’s initial offer to be press secretary, noting that she’s not even sure what that role does, especially after the past four years.

“'The border’s secure, President Biden is behind the scenes—he's a trapeze artist and a triathlete. You just can't see it!'” she said. “So I hope you take these same concerns to the people who've lied to your face for four years in this administration all the way to this crushing defeat of a sitting vice president who should have—who could have been—the first female president of color in our nation's history, but instead had to eat and own all the lies that had been told by this administration. Alternative facts was very simple. It was, I meant to say, alternative information, additional facts. It wasn't George Orwell. It wasn't a new set of facts. And you can read my whole book, there’s a whole chapter about it where I explain it. I don’t defend it myself, I explain it.”

Conway went on to say she’s proud of the work she did under the first Trump administration telling the American people what was happening in the White House.

“So here’s what I do,” she said. “I look at the full measure of people and if the idea is to try to cut them down from one thing they said, or one bad day they had, or one article they wrote, then I wish you a much happier life than all that, so I don’t have an answer to a question that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me except to say you can read my book about alternative facts, you can listen to the many interviews I’ve given about it, it was never actually a different set of facts, that’s pretty obvious.”

Conway concluded her response to the student by pointing out how the media turned on a dime after Trump won in 2016.

“They turned like that just when we need the media's help to tell the country what's going on, to co-parent the White House in the mainstream media to responsibly co-parent the country for 48 years, instead, they turn out to be a lot of deadbeat dads interested in not getting the story, but getting the president and tearing us down," she said.